Category: CASE

CASE Dalby Square Project ‘highly commended’ at Kent Design and Development Awards

The Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment’s Dalby Square project was shortlisted in three categories: Conservation, Residential Minor and Environmental  Performance in the Kent Design and Development Awards and won ‘highly commended’ in the Environmental Performance category. Focusing on key national priorities of climate change and aging population, the project evaluated exemplar climate change adaptation and retrofit strategies for heritage townhouses, while promoting opportunities for inter-generational living.

The Dalby Square project in Margate is a cross-sector collaboration between Kent County Council (KCC), Thanet District Council, CASE (Centre for Architecture and Sustainable Environment) at the University of Kent, the School of Psychology and the private sector. The aim was to develop and retrofit the KCC owned property at 12a Dalby Square into an exemplar residence that simultaneously addresses the challenges of climate change and promotes opportunities for inter-generational living, whilst also ensuring that the existing architectural details of the property are conserved and restored.

The refurbishment of the heritage townhouse in Dalby Square, Margate, has been completed and Kent County Council are looking for tenants. The three-generation family will be part of the innovative project, where extensive monitoring will take place, to evaluate the climate change adaptation strategies, whilst focusing on overheating, thermal comfort and energy performance, while testing the concept of multi-generation living. A ‘Sustainable Heritage Toolkit’ will be published to help other coastal towns across the UK.

CASE Open Lecture: Dr Maria Kikira, UK Green Building Council

The next CASE Open Lecture will be given by Dr Maria Kikira from UK Green Building Council, with her talk titled, ‘The role of UK Green Building Council in the built environment: Get involved, stay engaged!’. The lecture will take place on Tuesday 20th November at 6PM in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.

The presentation will cover the five thematic areas of UKGBC such as: climate change, resource use, nature & biodiversity, health & wellbeing, socio-economic impact, and how they are related to the built environment. There will also be an introduction to our Net Zero, Circular Economy, Climate Resilience, Cities and Social Value programmes from the perspective of working towards a sustainable future.

Maria is an architect with a passion for sustainable development in the built environment. She works for UK Green Building Council with the Learning and Development team, aiming to increase awareness and inspire the building industry on issues ranging from climate change, resource efficiency to health and well-being. Maria has a PhD on façade performance evaluation in relation to the indoor environment and extensive experience on European research programmes in the field of sustainability.

All welcome!

Historic Building Services Symposium featured in CIBSE Journal

A symposium held at the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) on 25 July 2018, organised by Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt in collaboration with CIBSE Heritage Group has been featured in an article in the September issue of CIBSE Journal, written by Liza Young, Deputy Editor. To read the full article, please see here: http://portfolio.cpl.co.uk/CIBSE/201809/28/.

The symposium, ‘Historic Building Services in Education, Practice and Research’, explored the value of studying historic building services and how it can inform the practice and education of building service engineers today. Through talks and discussions, the event provided a forum for practitioners, engineers and educators to investigate these questions. Speakers and panel chairs included Professor Dean Hawkes, University of Cambridge, Dr Neil Sturrock, Chairman of CIBSE Heritage Group, Caroline Cattini, Historic England, Phil Jones, Chairman of CIBSE CHP & District Heating Group, Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt, University of Kent, Andrew More, Senior Building Services Engineer, Historic England.

Kent School of Architecture MSc Architecture and Sustainable Environment students, and CASE (Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment) PhD students presented their work at the event, in addition to a PhD student from Cardiff University.

Urban Albedo project hosts workshop at London City Hall

CASE (Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment) organised a very successful workshop at London’s Living Room, City Hall on Monday 15th October 2018, marking the beginning of Green GB week.  The workshop, ‘Urban Albedo: Digital tools for urban resilience and growth’, was co-orgnised with Greater London Authority and the London Climate Change Partnership (LCCP), along with Brunel University and Loughborough University, who are both project partners.

The workshop, chaired by the former President of the Urban Design Group, Colin Pullan, brought together leading urban and building scientists, as well as practitioners from different backgrounds, to inform the impact of urban morphology and materials on urban albedo and its importance for health and well-being.

The speakers from the Industry Panel included:

  • The Concrete Centre
  • Fosters + Partners
  • SWECO
  • IESVE
  • CIBSE Resilient Cities

For further information about the Urban Albedo research project, please see here.

CASE Open Lecture: Dr Susan Parham, University of Hertfordshire

The upcoming CASE Open Lecture will be given by Dr Susan Parham, Head of Urbanism and Planning at the University of Hertfordshire on Tuesday 16th October at 6pm in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.

Her talk entitled, ‘Just what is ‘sustainable urbanism’ when it comes to food?’ will explore some of the ways cities and food are intertwined – drawing on urbanism research from the historical and contemporary city and its peri-urban edges, and will consider food’s sustainability as a highly contested area today in relation to what foodspace ‘works best’. Drawing on her own (and others’) applied research in the UK and elsewhere, Susan will consider some current design and planning focused urban foodscape and systems proposals for food-centred placemaking and retrofitting. Susan will argue the proposition that these approaches might contribute to responding to sharpening sustainability imperatives now and into the future.

Dr Susan Parham is Head of Urbanism and Planning at the University of Hertfordshire and Academic Director of the International Garden Cities Institute (IGCI). She researches and teaches on placemaking including food and urban design, planned settlements, sustainable materials, and masterplanning and retrofitting. Susan’s most recent book is Food and Urbanism (Bloomsbury, 2015) and her latest book chapters are in The Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food (2018), Agrourbanism (2018) and in Future Directions for the European Shrinking City (RTPI Library Series, 2016). Susan is a member of the Royal Society for the Arts and the Royal Town Planning Institute.

dalby_square_margate

Climate change adaptation and intergeneration living in a heritage townhouse in Margate

CASE, alongside Thanet Council and the School of Psychology, have been working on the Dalby Square project in Margate.

The project aims to tackle climate change, an ageing population and housing shortages. The refurbishment of the heritage townhouse in Dalby Square, Margate, has now been completed and Kent County Council are seeking the tenants. The three-generation family will be part of the innovative project, where extensive monitoring will take place, to evaluate the climate change adaptation strategies, focusing on overheating, thermal comfort and energy performance, while testing the concept of multi-generation living. The team was interviewed for the BBC news for the south-east last autumn.

At the end of the project, a ‘Sustainable Heritage Toolkit’ will be published to help other coastal towns across the UK.

Further information about the project can be found here and for more information about applying for the scheme, please contact Oakwood Homes on 01843 221133.

 

Sustainable Museums through the reuse of historic building services

Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt has been invited to speak about his current research project at the UK Spring Conference of the International Association of Museum Facilities Administrators (IAMFA), which is held at the Natural History Museum, London, on 3 – 4 May 2018. For the full list of speakers, see here.

He will be taking part in the main plenary session entitled‚ ‘The Technology Challenge Modernising Estates’ Systems‘. The event will be attended by 70 delegates, which include facilities managers from most major museums in the UK and Henrik will be will be exploring how findings of his current research project at the Houses of Parliament could be used to address questions of sustainability in historic museum buildings. The project investigates how far historic principles of ventilation could be reutilised and integrated within a modern sustainable system. As many museum buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth-century followed similar approaches to ventilation and as such the research can offer potential lessons for their refurbishment. Can the reuse of historic principles provide an alternative to the installation of completely new technologies?

Historic Building Services in Education, Practice and Research

A symposium held at the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) on 25 July 2018

Historic principles of environmental design has received renewed interest amongst practitioners, teachers and academic researchers. This interest is driven by the belief that these principles could provide valuable lessons for modern practice. Moreover, knowledge of historic building services can be important to engineers working within the field of building conservation.

The symposium, ‘Historic building services in education, practice and research‘ aims to to explore the value of studying historic building services and how it can inform the practice and education of building services engineers today.

Through talks and discussions the event will provide a forum for practitioners, engineers and educators to investigate these questions. Speakers and panel chairs include Professor Dean Hawkes, University of Cambridge, Dr Neil Sturrock, Chairman of CIBSE Heritage Group, Caroline Cattini, Historic England, Phil Jones, Chairman of CIBSE CHP & District Heating Group, Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt, University of Kent, Andrew More, Senior Building Services Engineer, Historic England.

Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt, convenor of the symposium, will also present the findings of his recent study on the views of practicing engineers regarding the value of research into historic building services. This was based on interviews and a survey that he has undertaken in connection with his National Teaching Fellowship Award.

Please book via Eventbrite.

For further information about the event, including the programme, please see CIBSE Services Symposium. If you have any queries, please email C.Malkin@kent.ac.uk.

Convenor

Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt is Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Architecture at the University of Kent, AHRC Leadership Fellow and member of the CIBSE Heritage Group. He is currently seconded to the Houses of Parliament to lead the research project ,Between Heritage and Sustainability – Restoring the Palace of Westminster’s nineteenth-century ventilation system’. Last year he has been made a National Teaching Fellow for his contribution to sustainability in architectural education. His work on the historic building services at the Houses of Parliament has been subject of feature article in the CIBSE Journal: http://portfolio.cpl.co.uk/CIBSE/201711/24/

MASE students present at Cambridge Conference

Seven students from the MSc in Architecture and Sustainable Environment presented papers at the 5th Annual Conference of the Construction History Society, which was held at Queens College, Cambridge on 6 and 7 April 2018. The focus of this year’s conference was on the history of building services and its relationship to the development of construction technology. It was an international conference with delegates from countries across the world, including Australia, US, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Sweden and France.

The students’ papers were based on research they have undertaken in the context of the module AR828 Rediscovery under the supervision of Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt. It is a specialist module on the history of environmental technologies within the MSc. In this modules students undertake research in the history of building services, which included  detailed case studies on the original environmental principles underlying the design of historic buildings.

The conference gave students the opportunity to gain important skills required in academic research, such as the writing of papers, going through the peer-review process, speaking to larger audiences about their work or taking part in plenary discussions, which involved dealing with critical comments or challenges questions from delegates or panel chairs.

Cover of Conference Proceedings

Seven peer-reviewed papers were published in ‚Studies in the History of Services and Construction, The Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the Construction History Society, Queen‘s College, Cambridge, 6-8 April  2018 (Cambridge: CHS, 2018)

The engagement of students in the conference forms part of initiatives that Dr Schoenefeldt has been leading in conjunction with his National Teaching Fellowship Award and ‚Between Heritage and Sustainability‘, a research project funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Dr Schoenefeldt giving opening keynote lecture at Queen’s College, Cambridge

Dr Schoenefeldt gave the opening keynote lecture of the conference and acted as chair the main building services stream.  His lecture, which was entitled ‚Towards a History of Building Services’ explored the relationship between construction and building services in the design of the Palace of Westminster.

CASE Open Lecture: Professor Sue Roaf, Heriot-Watt University

The next CASE Open Lecture will be given by Professor Sue Roaf, from Heriot-Watt University on Tuesday 20 March at 6pm in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.

How to Design a Comfortable Building

Comfort is a very costly business. Around 40% of global GDP is spent on buildings, for their construction, operation and demolition and most goes in keeping buildings cool or warm enough to occupy – using air-conditioning and central heating systems. That was fine in the age of cheap 20th century energy but as fossil fuels become less affordable – how will we afford to stay comfortable in the increasingly unstable and extreme weather, political and economic systems we occupy?  We need now to re-learn how to design buildings that can keep people thermally and economically safe in difficult times, not least in a warming world when so many modern buildings are over heating badly. This talk covers issues related to how and why many modern buildings fail to do so and describes a range basic Comfort Design Tools.  It proposes a three step method for designing comfortable buildings, based on lessons learnt while developing the adaptive approach to thermal comfort and describes a range of fundamental opportunities and planning methods for use during early comfortable buildings design stages.  It then outlines a few useful mind-set mantras that might help the designer in the process.

Sue Roaf gained her first degree in Architecture in 1975 at Manchester University. She subsequently went on to gain her Diploma in Architecture at the Architectural Association in London where she also took her Part 3 professional exam in 1978. In 1989 she was awarded a PhD for her study of the Windcatches of the Central Persian Desert from Oxford Brookes University where she taught from 1989 to 2005 both in professional studies, technology and design. She has practiced for a number of years on the design of housing, schools, hospitals and town planning.

She is best known as a designer for her Oxford Ecohouse which was the first UK building with an integrated photovoltaic roof. She is an award winning designer, teacher and author and is Co-Chair of TIA, the International Teachers in Architecture organisation and Co-Chair of the Westminster Carbon Counting Group. She began teaching at Heriot Watt in 2007 in the School of the Built Environment.